Bill H. Gross
[8] He then served in the Navy from 1966 to 1969 as an assistant chief engineer aboard the USS Diachenko, leading several sorties of SEALs to landing sites along the coast of Vietnam.
Gross briefly played blackjack professionally in Las Vegas, Nevada, and has said that he applies many of his gambling methods for spreading risk and calculating odds to his investment decisions.
Certainty for a bond investor like Gross included variables, such as credit ratings, yields, maturities, and duration, a measure of risk.
Gross took advantage of uncertainty by making educated – but accurate – guesses on the direction of interest rates, inflation and other variables that affect bonds.
They rarely traded — in fact bonds were typically kept in a vault, and selling meant physically mailing them to the buyer — and enjoyed cordial, clubby relationships with Wall Street.
Pimco, on the other hand, actively traded in and out of positions, expanded assertively into hot new areas like junk bonds and emerging markets, and used its increasing clout to cudgel banks into giving them better bids.
"[21] Following the collapse of Wall Street in 2008, Gross emerged as one of the nation's most influential financiers, and became among the most fervent supporters of the Obama administration's strategy (the Public-Private Investment Program, or P.P.I.P.)
[23][24][25] Gross himself left late in the fall of 2014, and in October 2015 sued Pimco and parent company Allianz for "hundreds of millions of dollars", claiming that he had been pushed out by a "cabal" of executives "Driven by a lust for power, greed, and a desire to improve their own financial position and reputation at the expense of investors and decency", calling them out for "improper, dishonest, and unethical behavior".
[40] As of November 2005, he became the third person (after Robert Zoellner in the 1990s and Benjamin K. Miller pre-1925)[41] to form a complete collection of 19th century United States postage stamps.
In October 2005, he purchased at auction for $2.97 million a unique plate block of the famous 1918 24-cent U.S. airmail stamps known as the "Inverted Jenny", featuring an engraving of a Curtiss JN-4 biplane printed upside-down.
Prior auctions of Gross's Great Britain, British Commonwealth, Western Europe, Scandinavia, Confederate States, Switzerland and Hawaii stamp collections have generated more than $26 million in proceeds.
Continuing his tradition, Gross told Barron's that proceeds from the latest sale would go to Doctors Without Borders and the New York Times Neediest Cases, with more charities to be announced later.
[46] In the foreword to former journalist David Rynecki's 2007 book, "Deals on the Green", Gross wrote golf was, "the most frustrating, damnable game ever conceived – alternately elevating and depressing you within the span of mere minutes.
[50] In October 2020, Gross and Schwartz sued their Laguna Beach neighbor Mark Towfiq, accusing him of developing an obsession with them, which included installing cameras directed at their property and "peeping tom behaviors."
In a request for a temporary restraining order, Gross said he felt "trapped in my own home", and added, "Defendant Towfiq appears to have a particular fascination not only with Mr.
[51] In a separate complaint filed after Gross and Schwartz's lawsuit, Towfiq accused the couple of harassing him by playing the theme from "Gilligan's Island" at loud volumes using outdoor speakers.
[52][53] In defense, Gross said that playing the theme from "Gilligan's Island" was not intended to be harassment, but that the song had special importance to him, while Schwartz contended that the artwork in question was so meaningful to her that she prayed to it.
His Scandinavian and Finnish stamp collections were sold by Spink auction house in May 2008 to make a donation to the Jeffrey Sachs Millennium Villages Project at Columbia University.
